"If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys."
— Madeleine L'Engle

Friday, May 06, 2011

Friday Five

I'm really bad about traditions. I like to do things a little different every time, which includes cooking. I pretty much try to never make the same thing twice....or at least to tweak it a little bit to see if I like it even better than before. My husband finds this both amusing and annoying. Amusing that I'm always pondering and dreaming about new foods, and annoying that the thing he thought was so wonderful for dinner will probably never happen again.
It extends to holidays too. I like to get different ornaments for our Christmas tree every year, and I really can't even recall what we "normally" do to begin making any traditions for our family.
But it's a little different when you have kids. All the sudden I find myself wanting to create traditions that are meaningful and intentional, to provide an opportunity for memories to be made and retold over and over. So I'm working on that.
In the meantime, I thought I'd start my own little tradition of naming the top five things that stand out to me about my week every Friday, just to practice doing something more than once. :)

1. Hazel started sleeping MUCH better this past week, allowing me to sleep for longer than an hour and a half at a time. Thank you my cute little monkey!

2. I decided to become a phone person. For some reason I've developed a slight phobia of talking on the phone - I always feel like I need the perfect situation to sit down and talk and have no interruptions...and I realized that will probably never happen again. So I'm overcoming my phobia and using my new bluetooth more often. It's nice to talk to people I love. :)

3. I recently started menu planning, and I love it! I need to work on menus that use common ingredients so I can trim my grocery bill a little bit, but so far I love the challenge of finding foods I think are worth eating that are also kid-friendly and somewhat quick to throw together.

4. I've been reminded so many times this week about how much I try to control my life. I'm not really a perfectionist, but I think I really like to know what to expect and try to plan everything out, and I think God is trying (probably has been for years but I'm just catching on) that I don't always get to know what to expect. I'm not in charge.

5. My family is really cool. I went home last weekend with James and Hazel, and each person made my weekend really special in several different ways. One of the best things was seeing James follow my brothers and dad around all weekend, just about the happiest I'd ever seen him. He is amazed at how many people are now in his family and is constantly asking me how many there would be if we got everyone from Andy's family and my family together. He always makes these wild guesses like 1,000? Or maybe 500? I usually try to talk him down to somewhere under 100, but truthfully I have no idea. Good project now that I think of it.